Entrepreneurship more important than innovation

When the four founders of Transformix Engineering Inc. decided to make Kingston its headquarters, it wasn’t because they called the city home for four years while studying at Queen’s University.

In fact, it wasn’t until after they had graduated and returned to visit friends that they grew fond of the idea, said president and chief executive Peng-Sang Cau.

Before they returned to visit, they essentially stayed within the campus’ borders.

“It was all Queen’s and it was get my degree and get out,” said Cau, who was inducted into the local business hall of fame last year.

During her stint at Queen’s, Cau can’t remember even being approached by the city about making Kingston her home.

“I think it’s the city’s job to cultivate an entrepreneur and make the environment friendly to businesses who want to come and who want to grow,” she said.

Cau was among those sitting on a panel today, organized by the Community Foundation for Kingston and Area, discussing whether Kingston is somewhere innovation can thrive.

While Cau feels the city might have a role in helping entrepreneurs, that isn’t the case with innovation.

“We have to stop making innovation a city initiative, or a government initiative,” she said in an interview afterward.

“Rather, it’s a culture, a mindset within organizations. Executives and CEOs of corporations, if they want the company to be innovative, they must be willing to take risks, they must be willing to let their employees make mistakes, must be willing to spend money on those mistakes, and … creating a culture that allows the place to be innovative.”

When she helped start Transformix, which builds high-speed, automated machinery, she turned to other business owners in the city for advice.

Entrepreneurs must be good at networking and selling as well.

“People seem to think, ‘I’ll build a great mousetrap, and somebody will buy,’ ” Cau said.

“I’m serious about that: there are tons of people out there with great ideas and are tinkering in their garage and it’s dead in the water because there’s not that additional person who says, ‘Wait, that’s brilliant. I wonder if there’s a market for it and how do I sell it?’ ”

As for Kingston as a lure for would-be entrepreneurs, the city has a distinct advantage, said Doug Watt, director of research of the Conference Board of Canada’s Organization Effectiveness and Learning Group: its education “cluster.”

The presence of Queen’s, Royal Military College and St. Lawrence College make Kingston unique for a city its size, Watt said.

“I don’t think there’s any city that has such a capacity of knowledge and skills development,” he explained.

Despite that wealth of resources, Kingston still gets a grade of “C” when it comes to innovation and entrepreneurship, the board found.

It’s not just Kingston, the board’s researchers found, but Canada as a whole.

That education “cluster” is the most important cluster in Watt’s view, and one that should benefit the city and the entrepreneurs it hopes to lure.

“The challenge always is what is the city doing itself and what are the businesses in Kingston doing to leverage that potential,” he said.

“And it’s not just students. There’s faculty, there’s machinery and equipment and technology that the university has that any of these smaller businesses don’t have access to. But if they go into partnership and collaborate, they can access it. They can access the skills of faculty, access the knowledge of students.”

The city should reach out and try to retain that highly educated workforce, Watt believes.

“I think you heard it here today; there’s a lack of awareness about what are the tools available,” he said. “There should be more opportunities for collaboration and networking.”

While Kingston’s location, geographically, is viewed as an advantage because it’s near Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Upstate New York, those cities can also drain the city of its educated workers, Watt said.

Even though the city doesn’t rank very high as an entrepreneurial city at the moment, that could eventually change, Watt said.

“Kingston has great opportunities,” Watt suggested.

For Transformix’s Cau, she feels the city has a part to play.

“The city does have a role in entrepreneurship,” she said, “and whether a city has the ability to create new businesses, that depends on the environment they create.”